Crooked River: A Novel

by Valerie Geary

  “Yeah?”

  “She seems to think it’s worth something, I guess. She keeps saying it’s ‘unlike anything he’s ever done before.’ Experimental. Edgy. Even more so than his older pieces. She thinks it’s going to be his grand reentry into the art world. His ‘resurrection.’ ” He took a cigarette from the pack, lifted it to his lips, then stopped and stared at it like he didn’t know how it had gotten there in the first place. He stuffed the cigarette back in with the rest and rolled his eyes. “Sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me.”

  “Maybe you should wait until you see it and then decide,” I said.

  He grunted and changed the subject. “So what’s the deal with your sister?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s kind of . . . weird. Right?”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek, trying to come up with a good answer.

  Travis folded his knees to his chest, so we were sitting almost the exact same way. “I’m not trying to be mean or anything. She just seems . . . I don’t know . . . quiet.”

  “It’s been a rough summer,” I said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  We were quiet for a few minutes, each of us lost in our own private thoughts, and then Travis asked, “Where’s your mom?”

  I stiffened but said nothing.

  “She doesn’t stay in the meadow with you guys?” he pushed.

  I folded my hands together and squeezed until my fingers started to hurt, not sure what to say, what not to say, not knowing how much he knew already and how much I was willing to tell. A yellow-and-black butterfly flitted past us and disappeared across the water.

  He touched my arm. “Sam?”

  My fingertips had turned white, but they didn’t hurt so much anymore. Not compared to the lump growing in my throat and the headache starting to pulse at the base of my neck. I stared at part of a wooden fence visible through the trees on the other side of Crooked River, stared and tried not to cry.

  I hugged my knees as tight to my chest as I could and said, “Our mom . . . ,” but I couldn’t think of a good way to finish.

  Died seemed too blunt and cold, too much like being punched in the ribs by a stranger. Passed away was filled with too much sighing and melodramatic clasping of hands. Kicked the bucket turned the whole horrible thing into a child’s game. Finally, I settled on, “She had a heart attack.”

  Travis turned so he was facing me and said, “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. Is she . . . She’s okay, right?”

  I wanted more than anything to say yes, yes, she was fine; she was spending the summer in Greece or Spain or Fiji. Someplace warm and beautiful and interesting. In a few weeks, she would come back for me and Ollie, come and take us home.

  “Sam?” Travis squeezed my arm.

  I looked at him, then looked away again so I didn’t fall apart, and in that single second, in that swinging glance, without me ever having to say a word, he understood what had happened. He let go of my arm and buried his fingers in his hair.

  He shook his head and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” even though none of it had anything to do with him.

  I stared into the sun until my tears burned dry.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m getting used to it.”

  I wanted to change the subject. I wanted to slide off this rock and slink away. I wanted Travis to stop rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes and apologizing. I wanted him to smile instead. He was cute when he smiled.

  “Maybe you should have brought me two cobblers,” I said.

  Travis stared at me. He shook his head and said, “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Do what?” I frowned.

  “Pretend it’s not important.”

  I shrugged. Pretending was easier.

  Travis sighed and stared out across the water again. After a few seconds, he said, “I bet you didn’t know I had a sister.”

  “You do?” I was embarrassed for not knowing this. Terrebonne’s population was 916, on a good day, and even though I only lived here a couple weeks a year, between Franny and Deputy Santos I heard enough about everybody else’s business that I should have known Travis had a sister.

  He cleared his throat. “I did.” He reached for his Marlboros but didn’t pull out a cigarette. It seemed enough for him to just hold the pack. “She died a long time ago.”

  I leaned into Travis’s shoulder to feel his warmth and the pressure of him there, to feel him push back. “How?”

  “Car accident.” He pinched the skin on his wrist. “They said she died instantly, that she didn’t feel any pain. But I think they just said that so I’d stop crying.”

  “How old were you?” I was whispering now, unable to force the words louder.

  “Seven,” he said. “She had just turned nine. It was her birthday, and they were coming home from her party.”

  There was a stone in my throat making it hard to swallow, a fist in my chest making it painful to breathe.

  Travis went on, “Dad was driving. Mom and I, we were supposed to be in the car too, but I woke up with a bad fever that morning so she stayed home with me. Some asshole crossed the center line. Pushed them straight into a tree.”

  “Oh my God.” My words barely a whisper.

  The river flowed into our silence, rushing and tumbling without end.

  “It never really goes away, you know,” Travis said, reaching over and pressing one finger to the base of my throat near my collarbones. “That sharp ache you feel right here. You get used to it, but it’s always there.”

  “Like a bee sting that won’t quit,” I whispered.

  He nodded and lifted his hand, but I could still feel the pressure of his finger, the heat burning there at the surface. I gulped air and swallowed and tried to think of something, anything else, but I kept seeing her. Mom, lying on her back on the blue-and-yellow quilt, eyes open, staring up at the stars. Fireworks boomed overhead, and she was staring and staring, but not seeing. And her skin was so gray. So completely and finally gray. Wiped of color, of life, of love. And then Ollie, kneeling beside her, grabbing her arm and shaking hard, saying, “Mom? Mom? Mom, wake up,” over and over. I had pushed her back, screaming at her, “Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her!” because, even though I didn’t believe in that kind of thing, somewhere before I’d heard it was bad luck to touch the dead.

  “We were right there,” I said. “Ollie and me. Sitting right there with her and we never knew anything was wrong until it was too late. Maybe it was because the fireworks were so loud or because there were so many people screaming. We were all screaming. The stars were so big. The night was on fire. It was all so beautiful. Until.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head, opened them again, but the terrible images remained.

  “I pushed Ollie away from her.” My voice wavered. “I shoved her like Mom was contagious or something. I just kept thinking that if Ollie touched her, she’d die, too.”

  I didn’t realize I’d been crying until Travis brushed his fingers over my cheek. I pulled away from him and wiped my own tears.

  Laughing a little and squinting at the churning white water, I said, “It was her one chance to say good-bye, her last chance to say ‘I love you,’ and whatever else needed saying, and I couldn’t even let her have that much.”

  “Sam . . .”

  “The paramedics came and some old woman named Marge drove us to the hospital and we called Mom’s best friend, Heather, and then Bear and Grandma and Grandpa, and then we waited in the chapel with a social worker who had hot pink fingernails and kept popping her gum and looked way too young to be there. When I asked when we could go see our mom, she kept saying, ‘In a little while, honeycakes. In a little while.’ And then Heather was there, crying and shuffling us out of the hospital and back home where she told us to go to bed, that Bear wo
uld be there when we woke up and everything would be fine.” I shrugged and tossed a mangled piece of moss into the water. “Bear was there in the morning. So were Grandma and Grandpa. But nothing was fine. Nothing has been fine since.”

  Travis didn’t say anything for a few seconds, then, quietly, “Did you get to see her again? Did you have another chance to say good-bye?”

  I shook my head. “Grandma said it was a bad idea.”

  “What about at the funeral?”

  “Closed coffin. Anyone could have been in that thing. Or no one.”

  He rocked back a little, his shoulder sliding against mine. He said, “I didn’t get to say good-bye either.”

  Neither of us said anything for a few seconds, then Travis’s voice shifted to something dark and secret. He said, “You have to promise you won’t say anything because it’s not technically legal . . .”

  I nodded and he continued, his voice still hushed, almost a whisper, “Mom and Dad buried her out in the woods behind our house one night while I was sleeping.”

  I shivered even though we were sitting in the sun.

  He said, “The next morning when they told me, I got upset about not being there and they told me it was better this way, that it wasn’t the kind of thing a kid my age needed to see. I used to go out there a lot when I was younger and sit under the dogwood tree they planted, but then I started thinking about how she was just right there, rotting beneath me, nothing between us but a few feet of dirt.” He shivered a little too. “I haven’t gone to see her for years. Because she’s not there, anyway, right? Not the part of her that matters.”

  I turned my head and for the first time saw how close we were, our faces nearly touching. He smelled like the river, like water rushing and snow melting and sun and green algae and beneath that, other things, too. The hint of wildflowers and honey and stretched-out days. He smelled like summer.

  He reached his hand to my face, cupped my chin. I kept my eyes wide open. There were flecks of storm-cloud gray in his. I thought he might kiss me and I thought about pulling away, asking him if he was sure this is what he wanted, if he was doing this because he liked me or because he felt sorry for me, but I didn’t. I stayed quiet and let him draw me closer. His breath was warm and fast. His cheeks flushed apple red with life.

  A branch cracked somewhere in the woods behind us, and we jumped apart before our lips had a chance to brush together. Travis dropped his hand and turned away from me. Whatever thin thread had been drawing us closer snapped, and then it was just me again, unmoored and drifting. And Travis, standing up now, hopping off the rock into the sand, increasing the distance. My chances for a first kiss, ruined, but maybe it was better this way, less complicated.

  Another branch cracked, and I turned to look. Bear stepped out of the trees onto the path. He walked slowly toward us. I climbed off the rock, gathered my shoes under my arm, and went to meet him.

  “Where’s your sister?” His eyes scanned the riverbank.

  “At camp. She didn’t want to come.” I stared at his brown suit jacket and trousers, his white-collared shirt all buttoned and tucked in, his navy-blue-and-gold tie, his shiny brown shoes. His hair was slicked back, his beard combed, his face washed. “Where have you been?”

  Bear jerked his head at Travis, who had come up behind me. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Franny told me you had an interview at the mill?”

  “She shouldn’t have.” Bear clawed at his tie, loosening it, pulling it off. Like a snake shedding his skin. “I don’t like you leaving your sister alone like this.”

  “She’s fine. She’s in the teepee reading.” I grabbed the tie from him.

  It was one I remembered from before when he had a real job and lived in a real house and kept his hair cut short. I ran my thumb over gold dots that were actually crested gold lions, running in a diagonal pattern across the dark blue background.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  He took the tie back and stuffed it into his pants pocket. “I’m going to need you to start taking on more responsibility for your sister, okay? Especially when I’m not here.”

  “I told you, she’s fine. If she needed something, she would have come and got me, or screamed or something. We’re not that far away. I would have heard her.”

  “She’s just a kid, Sam.”

  “She’s ten.”

  “Your mom would want you to look out for her.”

  I glared at him. The words I wanted to say—How the hell do you know what Mom would want?—stuck in my throat. I shoved my feet into my shoes and, without bothering to tie the laces, started walking back to the meadow.

  Travis followed me.

  Bear called after us, but by then we were too far down the path to hear what he said.

  Travis nudged my elbow. “Hey, I’m sorry if I got you in trouble.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “You going to be okay out here?” he asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” I slapped at a leaf dangling above the path.

  “Well.” He cleared his throat. “Because of Bear and everything.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Are you sure he’s safe?”

  I walked a little slower. “What do you mean? Of course he’s safe.” But my mind kept slipping back to the night he left me and Ollie alone, to the scratches on his cheek and the key I’d found. I asked, “Why would you think that he isn’t?”

  “Since that woman turned up dead, people have been talking,” Travis said. “They’ve been saying Bear might have had something to do with it.”

  “What people?”

  Travis shrugged. “I don’t know. Just people in town and stuff.”

  “And you believe them?”

  He hesitated, and when he finally spoke, his voice was soft, the way it can get when someone’s about to deliver bad news. “He’s always been a little . . . eccentric. He’s out here by himself all the time. He doesn’t really get along with anyone in town. People think he might be dangerous.”

  I tore a leaf from a bush crowding the path, crushed it in my fist, and then dropped it. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Is it?” Travis grabbed my hand.

  I shook him off and walked faster. “People should mind their own damn business.”

  “They’re worried, that’s all. About their families and kids,” Travis said, catching up to me, keeping pace. “And they’re worried about you, too. You and your sister, living out here with him, not knowing what he’s capable of.”

  “Well, they’re wasting their energy. Bear isn’t dangerous. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” But even as I said the words, I was starting to doubt them.

  We had reached the edge of the meadow. Travis grabbed my arm and pulled me to a stop just inside the tree line. He said, “Just be careful. That’s all I’m saying.”

  He looked genuinely concerned, and I didn’t know what else to say, except, “We’ll be fine.”

  I don’t think he was convinced, but he let go of my arm and didn’t say anything else about it.

  Ollie was outside again, sitting with her book in the shade. When Travis and I emerged from the trees, she dropped the book on the ground, jumped to her feet, and ran over to us. She planted herself directly in front of Travis and extended a closed fist, fingers facing up. Her lips were turning white they were pressed so tight together, and the expression on her face was much too serious for any kid, though I’d seen it on Ollie more than once this summer.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  She didn’t even look at me as she uncurled her fingers and opened her hand. Resting flat in her palm was a lighter. In the sunlight, it glinted gold.

  I looked at it, then looked at Travis. “Isn’t that yours?”

  “No.” He shook his head and dropped his gaze. “No, I
don’t think so.”

  Ollie pushed the lighter closer.

  “It looks like yours,” I said, and then, remembering earlier how he’d taken a cigarette from the pack but hadn’t smoked it, “Check your pockets.”

  He patted his pockets and, finding nothing, leaned in for a better look. He rubbed his hand back and forth across his neck, and then finally said, “You know what? Yeah. I think that is mine.”

  He plucked it from Ollie’s palm and turned it over a couple of times, then slipped it into his pocket.

  “Thanks,” he said, and then to me, “I better go.”

  I nodded, then put my arm around Ollie’s shoulders and pulled her close to me. “Thanks for the cobbler and everything.”

  He smiled, but it was a weak, halfhearted attempt, making him look sad and hollowed out. He seemed about to say something else, something important, but Bear emerged from the trees right then and whatever Travis might have been thinking about saying he kept to himself.

  Shoulders hunched and hands plunged deep into his pockets, Travis crossed the meadow alone. He reached the path that led to the road, and I stood waiting for him to turn around and wave, but he kept walking with his head down. A few minutes later, his dirt bike started up and shrieked away.

  That night, Bear fried up fresh trout for us over an open flame. The meat was pink and tender and seasoned with pepper and a spoonful of honey. I think it was his way of saying sorry, of trying to make up for leaving us alone all day. Ollie grubbed down her piece of fish like she hadn’t eaten in days. I picked at mine, taking smaller and smaller bites until finally I just stopped eating altogether.

  Bear nodded at my plate. “Not hungry?” His lips were covered in grease and shining in the firelight.

  I shrugged and poked at my uneaten fish.

  Bear stared at me across the flickering coals and then said, “I stopped by the house this afternoon.”

  I couldn’t look at him.

  “Franny was pretty upset. She said you were, too.” He waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, he continued, “We’re going over there first thing tomorrow morning to set things straight, okay? We’re going to call Detective Talbert and get everything out in the open the way we should have from the beginning.”